


Naurthoniel and the Heroism of Housekeeping in Mithrim

by Himring



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Bechdel Test, Cross-cultural, Danger, Family, Female Friendship, Female Protagonist, Gen, Humor, Noldor - Freeform, Onion pasties and cinnamon buns, POV Female Character, Sindar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 16:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Himring/pseuds/Himring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Feanorians are camped on one side of the lake of Mithrim, the Fingolfinians on the other.  Many of the Feanorians would welcome the Fingolfinians, but do not dare--what action then might they take?</p><p>The back-story of Maedhros's housekeeper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sneaky for a Noldo

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written (i.e. begun) for Aliana's Action-Adventure Bechdel Test Challenge on LiveJournal (January 2013). Probably passes the Bechdel, but not quite the Action-Adventure test.

A little more firmly than necessary, she pushed the tray with the left-over onion pasties back into the oven to re-heat them. In the shadowy corner, concealed behind a stack of firewood, sat the carrier-basket she had packed with so much care and thought. She stopped herself from glancing anxiously that way again. Better not be careless now--although the evening meal was over and there was no one except for her in the kitchen any longer, somebody might still come in any moment for this or that, the way they did, and notice.

She herself had eaten nothing. Her stomach was cramping with tension, too much even to consider the idea of food.  She stared at the oven—she needed to pay more attention to what she was doing—and sniffed. Where those pasties hot enough? No matter, they would do. She was running out of time. She pulled the tray out and slid the pasties onto a wooden platter.

She bit her lips, listening for steps. There were none, just the rise and fall of voices some distance away. She grabbed the carrier-basket—it was heavy, filled to the brim—and slung it over her shoulders, stopped to listen again,  picked up the platter with the pasties in her left hand and, opening the door with her right, slipped out into the darkness.

Trying to walk unobtrusively between the tents and huts without actually hiding—there was no reason why she shouldn’t be carrying a heavy basket around this evening, if she wanted to, but oh, how conspicuous she felt! She told herself: _Don’t run. Don’t look anxious and draw attention to yourself. You haven’t even done anything yet…_

She reached the agreed spot and, as expected, nobody was around at this hour. She slipped the basket off her shoulders and leant it against the wall. Then she took a deep breath, let it out again, and walked casually around the hut to the guard post where Ceredir would be keeping watch.

He was there, and another on guard with him.

‘ _Aiya_ , _Carindo_!’

‘Narye! That’s a surprise! What brings you here so late?’

‘I made onion pasties tonight. There were some left over. I remembered how you like them and that you would not have had a chance to have any, on guard out here, so I thought I would warm them up a bit and take them out to you.’

‘Narye, you are a treasure!  Minyo, have you tasted any of Narye’s onion pasties before? No? Then you are in for a treat, I can tell you!’

She placed the platter into Ceredir’s hands, smiling. It felt almost natural.

‘Enjoy!’ she bade them, warmly, and left.

She made as if to walk back into the centre of the camp, but reaching the shadows under the eaves of the last hut, she turned sharply, circled a bush and headed straight back out, sure all the while that Ceredir and his companion were watching her every move and any moment now would call out and ask her what she thought she was playing at. She should have told Ceredir what she was planning to do. He would have understood; she was almost certain of that. She had not wanted to get him into trouble.  Was she even sure that there was any trouble to get into? All this was so ridiculous, playing hide and seek with Ceredir as if they were still children together…

No call came. Maybe her plan had worked and Ceredir and his friend were too engrossed in the pasties to notice her odd behaviour. Or maybe Ceredir had seen her, immediately guessed what she was doing and decided to keep his mouth shut. And in truth, the task of the guards was mainly to keep orcs—and maybe, just maybe Fingolfinians—from getting in, not anyone of their own from getting out. But, because of the possible dangers out there, nobody could go for a lonely midnight stroll without raising questions she did not want asked.

She had passed through the open space around the edge of the Feanorian camp. She had made it; she was outside. She had not been confined to the camp, of course; in fact, she had been out here frequently, although more often during the day and hardly ever alone, but tonight things felt different. There was a border she had crossed.

The black bushes that now sheltered her from the sight of the guards should have felt friendly and quite familiar. Instead, they felt alien. She was reminded that she was a Noldo in exile, standing in foreign territory. It was she herself who had picked a night of no moon to undertake this venture and yet...

There was an almost inaudible rustle. She was sure that even that sound was solely for her benefit. Suddenly, the Sinda was there, almost in front of her nose. As her eyes began to adjust, she saw that the Sinda was carrying her basket. So she had retrieved it from where Naurthoniel had deposited it for her to find.

‘There you are. Very sneaky, for a _Lachenn_ ’, said the Sinda. She sounded amused, perhaps even mocking.

‘Hush’, muttered Naurthoniel. ‘Let’s get going, quickly. It’s quite a long way.’

The Sinda shrugged. ‘That’s a heavy basket. Shall I carry it for you?’

‘No! I’ll carry it. You look out for…things.’

Without more ado, the Sinda helped her to shoulder the basket again. The weight of it felt almost comforting now; it seemed to steady Naurthoniel. She lifted her head.

‘Lead the way’, she murmured.

Together, the Noldo and the Sinda disappeared into the night of Mithrim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Name fudge:
> 
> Naurthoniel and Ceredir were named originally before I knew whether they were Noldor or Sindar, so I named them in Sindarin. Sadly, I suspect Naurthoniel translates into something awful-sounding in Quenya (Nar-Tintalle??!), so for now every Quenya speaker will be using the pet form Narye for her, unless I can figure out an alternative.
> 
> Ceredir translates into Quenya as "Carindo". Maybe.


	2. Through the Dark of Mithrim

  
The night grew darker still. Not only was there no moon but sulphurous clouds were emanating from Angband again and many of these came drifting south- and westwards across the sky above Mithrim. They were black as soot and obscured most of the stars.  
  
Moreover, the way the Sinda was leading Naurthoniel was well away from the lake shore, from open areas and the more well-trodden paths where they might have been spotted by watchers or had an accidental encounter with anyone out on more legitimate business. She headed deep into the woods, into thick undergrowth, into the cover of a tangle of branches and leaves. Naurthoniel began harbouring the unworthy suspicion that she was also being taken on a tour of all the thorniest brier patches in Mithrim.  
  
She was not exactly lost—she still knew which way the lake lay, although she was less sure precisely how far it was away. But this territory was quite unfamiliar to her and, flame-eyed Noldo or not, she could see very little. She dodged another thorny branch and tried to peer into the shadows ahead.  
  
Scouts had reported evidence for the increasing presence of spies—orcs and others—in Hithlum. Anyone they encountered out here was more likely to be Sindarin than anything else. But some of Morgoth’s spies had once been Sindar.  
  
She wore a long dagger strapped to her side and had been instructed in its use. At Alqualonde, she had drawn blade, but before she could spill as much as a single drop of Telerin blood, a Telerin arrow had struck her deep in the right shoulder, and after that she had spent most of the rest of the battle behind Ceredir’s back, doing her very best not to hamper his sword arm or to faint. She was not sure how she felt about that—most of the time she was inclined to think that it made her just as much of a kin-slayer as Ceredir, only with less to show for it.

Later, in Beleriand, she had spent the campaigns against Morgoth struggling with the supply side of things, which was difficult enough under the circumstances to keep her from getting involved in actual combat. As martial heroes went, she was an amazingly good house-keeper, one who could even do without the luxury of a house, at a pinch. But what then was she doing out here in the dark, with a Sinda whose name she didn’t even know?  
  
Call me ‘Huntress’, the young Sinda had said when she first turned up with a brace of rabbits, venison for the pot to trade in return for Noldorin goods. She had said it with an edge of bravado that suggested to Naurthoniel that among her own people this might be a title she hadn’t quite earned yet. They had agreed on a mutually satisfactory exchange, which had been followed by others, all mutually satisfactory, at least as far as Naurthoniel could tell, all carefully and politely negotiated.  
  
She had no reason to distrust the Sinda. It was true that she had received no acknowledgement whatsoever of the supplies she had secretly sent around to the other side of the lake, except for Huntress’s assurances that she had faithfully delivered them as promised. But what had she expected? A gushing thank-you letter of the kind that they had been taught in Tirion to pen after their begetting-days? They had no real reason to be grateful, those over there--in fact, no reason to be grateful at all.  
  
And if she did distrust Huntress, what could be more foolish than venturing out here in her company where she was completely in her power? She had a healthy respect for archery now and did not doubt that Huntress would be able to disable or kill her with her bow and arrows before she got anywhere near her with that dagger, even without help. Those would have been unthinkable thoughts to have of a fellow Elf, once. Even now, they still filled her with burning shame.  
  
Huntress would not have needed to lure her out here if she wanted the contents of the basket for herself. She had already had it in her possession from the moment she picked it up outside the hut. She could just have walked away with it without waiting for Naurthoniel. And there was even less reason to suspect her of playing an even deeper game.  
  
Naurthoniel stumbled after Huntress down a slope into a deep dell and tried hard to suppress a fit of coughing. This dip in the land was sheltered from the wind, and the fumes from Angband had settled here and lingered.  
  
‘Don’t worry, you can cough freely. Nobody can hear us’, said Huntress as Naurthoniel almost choked.  
  
‘Are you sure?’ asked Naurthoniel in a hoarse whisper.  
  
‘Quite sure’, said Huntress.  
  
She was Sindarin. She was also very young, thought Naurthoniel, but nevertheless she gave in and coughed. She was coughing still when they emerged on the other side. Huntress shared a soothing draught of water with her from the flask she carried, and the cough finally subsided.  
  
‘Thank you’, said Naurthoniel awkwardly and was suddenly fervently grateful after all for what she had been spared at Alqualonde, although in being so she felt acutely disloyal to Ceredir. Not that the Sindar of northern Beleriand resembled their distant relatives of Alqualonde all that much, really…  
  
‘Tell me about Tirion’, said Huntress, after they had walked on a little.  
  
It was how Naurthoniel paid her for her help, even more than by the gift of a few small items of forged metal: a brooch, a short, sharp knife, a handful of pins. She did not at all want to think of Tirion just then, walking in the dark among the trees of Mithrim, but she had to pay her dues, so she tried hard to concentrate while straining at the same time to listen for sounds of movement around them—pointlessly, because Huntress would almost certainly hear anything suspicious long before she did.  
  
She began in a low voice: ‘We had an inn in Tirion—perhaps more of a tavern, really, although we kept a few bedrooms for travellers as well. My mother had grown weary of being in service at the palace and wanted to set up independently. So Prince Feanor gifted her some of the capital outright and gave her the rest as a loan on very generous terms and, together with her savings, it was enough to buy the property, a well-placed site in an outer suburb of Tirion, and build on it. The prince and his family would pass that way when they came into town from their homestead nearby and sometimes they would stop and stay for an hour and Prince Feanor would say, by way of a compliment and as a joke, that his investment had paid off exceedingly well…’  
  
‘No’, said Huntress, ‘tell me what it was like!’  
  
Naurthoniel stopped. Although Naurthoniel was speaking Sindarin or at least using words as they would have sounded if they had existed in northern Sindarin in that sense, she suspected that Huntress had not understood very much of what she had just been saying. She would not say so; it seemed to be a matter of pride with her to pretend she was simply not interested in what she did not understand. Further south on the coast, in the cities of Brithombar and Eglarest, the Sindar probably knew all about capital and property and loans, but not here.  
  
‘The inn was quite a large building’, Naurthoniel tried again. ‘Most of the ground floor was taken up with the dining-hall and the kitchen and scullery. The bedrooms for the guests and for the family were on the first floor. The walls were white-washed, and the roof was tiled. In the front-yard, we had set up benches and tables where guests could sit outside in fair weather. The street was paved. We had strung coloured flags across above, to make it look more inviting and attractive. We were famous for our cinnamon buns…’  
  
‘It sounds exciting’, said Huntress.  
  
She did not seem to be joking. She lived in northern Beleriand where Morgoth’s forces were a daily threat. In her young life, she had seen the first sunrise and the first moonrise. And nevertheless she thought the description of a humdrum inn in Tirion sounded exciting, just as Naurthoniel once, on the other side of the sea, had thought tales of her people’s march through Endore wonderfully thrilling.  
  
Naurthoniel did not know what to say. It struck her that she had been using the past tense, but the inn might still exist, on the other side of the Sea, and even be flourishing. If it was, it would not be famous for its cinnamon buns anymore; she was the one who used to bake them.  
  
‘Why did you leave?’ asked Huntress bluntly—for the first time.  
  
She was young indeed. None of the older Sindar asked that question straight out, although you could see them thinking it, sometimes. Naurthoniel could not have answered her even if she had been able to speak freely. There had been a sufficiency of reasons at the time, she knew. It would not have been possible to stay behind. But none of those reasons, it seemed to her, could now be convincingly explained to a young Sinda in the middle of the night in Mithrim.  
  
‘Morgoth killed our king’, she said.  
  
It sounded really rather lame to her, although Finwe’s murder had certainly been one of the reasons and had come as a great shock to her. But Huntress appeared to accept her explanation. They went on in silence.


	3. Friendly Enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is where it gets really rather grim, although perhaps not quite in the way you expect.

  
The trees were thinning and, at the same time, the wind picked up. There was a rustling of leaves about them. Above their heads, the clouds tore apart and scattered. Stars shone through the gaps.  
  
They were nearing the Fingolfinian camp. Naurthoniel began to recognize landmarks familiar to her from the time when they themselves had freely roamed the area: a hollow tree colonized by wild bees, bramble patches where she had harvested blackberries last autumn. And here was a birch grove where she had sometimes found chanterelles.  
  
They came to a wide shallow space where a stream ran over clean sand and among boulders before it flowed into the lake. They had washed their clothing there. According to Huntress, so did the Fingolfinians.  
  
Naurthoniel halted in the shadow of an oak at the edge of the clearing. Huntress took another step, noticed at once that Naurthoniel was not following her and turned to look at her questioningly. On the other side of the stream, near the edge, stood a tall lonely figure, waiting. The fitful starlight illuminated her just enough for Naurthoniel to be certain of her identity.  
  
She had come as arranged—Erien, her second cousin once-removed, her closest remaining relative in the Fingolfinian camp. And she had come alone. It was unlikely that she had not told anyone at all who she was going to meet, Naurthoniel thought. But whoever she had told, they had let her come alone. There could have been the High Lord Fingolfin himself out there, waiting to reduce her to cinders in his wrath. There could have been—far more likely—a troop of guards waiting to drag her into the Fingolfinian camp and before the authorities. But apparently there was not.  
  
Slowly, she went down into the hollow, Huntress following now. When they came to the stream, Naurthoniel walked straight into it without remembering to take off her shoes. She shrugged slightly, when she realized, and just went on, under Erien’s unmoving gaze.  
  
As Naurthoniel approached, she could see—with increasing clarity—how gaunt that rigid figure was: the hollow cheeks, the dark rings under her eyes, the bony hands. She came closer and saw that, in more prosperous days, what Erien was wearing they would both have called rags, barely fit for outdoor work in the shed or in the byre. She came up out of the water and could go no further.  
  
She took off her tall basket and sank down behind it—like a propitiatory offering, like a shield wall.  
  
‘I brought some more things’, she whispered. ‘I thought you might want other things than food, but I wasn’t sure what was needed.’  
  
She began fumbling with the familiar fastenings, but now she was all thumbs.  
  
‘Don’t you want to know how they died?’ her cousin asked. Her voice was clear, almost unemotional.  
  
Naurthoniel shrank down over her basket like a hare under a stooping falcon. In the pouch at her belt burnt the letter, the anxious message that she had sent to the one person in the Fingolfinian camp that she had been confident was still talking to her—if only to scold her within an inch of her life. Huntress had returned it to her and, when she had unfolded it, she had read the words, in cramped letters squeezed into the blank space that remained underneath her signature:  
  
 _Elvea is dead. So are Ninde and Rusco. Erien_  
  
‘If you want to tell me’, Naurthoniel whispered now.  
  
‘Ninde died almost as soon as we started the Crossing’, began Erien, as if reciting a well-rehearsed list. ‘She slipped on the ice, fell into the icy water and her heart stopped.  
  
‘Elvea broke her leg, twisting it in a crevasse. Out there—no warmth, no light, hardly any food—the break refused to heal. We pulled her along with us, limping arm in arm or dragging her on an improvised sled, but she became convinced she was slowing us down too much and, when we lay down to rest, she managed to hide from us. We looked for her all round about, but in the dark we could not find her.’  
  
‘Rusco almost lived to see the moonrise. But he kept crying for his mother—and most kinds of food I could find him out there he refused to eat. I woke up beside him and he was dead, already frozen stiff. I was so exhausted I had not felt it when he died.’  
  
Naurthoniel lifted her head and said; ‘You must not blame yourself.’  
  
‘No’, said Erien distantly, ‘I’m not the one who must blame herself.'  
  
Naurthoniel shrank down again, cowering over her basket. If anyone had asked her, at any time, whether she wished to leave her relatives and friends behind in Araman, she would have said no. That being so, there must have been a point she had missed—there must have been several points at which she ought to have raised her voice in protest, rebelled, taken a stance, put her foot down. And she had failed to do so.  
  
You would have thought they would have been obvious—those moments at which she ought to have firmly said No—but looking back on events, they had not been. What her memory of leaving Valinor and Araman showed her was a great deal of confusion and uncertainty, a jumble of moments of unsuspected courage and unsuspected cowardice—and the sudden sharp shock with which she found herself staring at the smoking wreckage drifting in the shallows and knew herself twice separated from her kin--those she had left in Tirion and from those she had left in Araman. She ought to have seen that coming, surely—she must have, at least hours earlier than that. It was ridiculous, self-serving, yes, patently untrue—and yet that was how she remembered it: herself in the middle of a knot of four or five friends, staring at the charcoaled hulls in dumb-founded silence.  
  
She bowed her head and pushed her basket forward across the ground until it rested at Erien’s feet. Then she gathered herself, rose up and turned to go.  
  
‘Narye’, said Erien—and when Naurthoniel looked back, her face looked more animated, alive.  
  
‘Tell me, Narye’, Erien asked, ‘is it dangerous what you do—for you?’  
  
 _We are all in danger, together, every single one of us_ , thought Naurthoniel. But what Erien clearly meant was: danger from Feanorians, if she was discovered carrying food around the lake.  
  
She shrugged.  
  
‘Oh, probably not’, she said. ‘There has been wild talk…’  
  
Of course there had been wild talk. Moods in the Feanorian camp had been seesawing wildly, ever since the Fingolfinians had unexpectedly appeared in Mithrim—ever since the first tentative negotiations had begun and had almost immediately stalled.  
  
Rumours flourished. Arguments blew up out of nowhere. It was predictable and once she would have assumed it could safely be ignored altogether. But bitter experience had taught her that wild talk could lead to wild actions.  
  
‘Then don’t come here again’, said Erien. ‘Don’t put yourself in danger if you can help it. But keep sending us things. We do need them. Every little helps while we’re learning to live in this land.’  
  
Naurthoniel had had no intention of inflicting her presence on Erien again. But now she studied her cousin’s face and thought that she would have to come again--not soon, but eventually, just to check that those hollow cheeks were filling out a little, that the rings under Erien’s eyes were becoming less pronounced. And if they survived long enough, both of them, they might even talk about forgiveness one day.  
  
‘Send me a list of what you need’, she said.  
  
Then she stepped into the water and began wading back across the stream to where Huntress was standing waiting for her.  
  
She and Huntress set off at a quick pace, back along the route they had come.  
  
They had covered quite a bit of distance before Huntress said to her: ‘She wasn’t very friendly, your kinswoman.’  
  
Naurthoniel blinked. It occurred to her that she and Erien had spoken to each other in Quenya throughout. Huntress had probably not understood a single word.  
  
‘Friendly enough’, Naurthoniel said.  
  
Huntress gave her a frowning, puzzled look. Then she reached out and cautiously touched Naurthoniel’s shoulder. She quickly pulled her hand away again.  
  
It was the touch that did it. Naurthoniel wept, on and off, half the way back around the lake, as quietly as she could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bechdel backfire notice: It is not meant to be implied that only women and children died during the Crossing of the Helcaraxe (or that only the women cared!).


	4. Have a Rose

 

When she was finally caught, it was because she no longer expected to be. As she was crossing the yard with yet another basketful of baked goods and miscellaneous other items, she was partly wondering whether she ought really to have included that pair of socks she had just finished knitting and partly fuming that all this secrecy was still necessary. Oh, how could those negotiations have just failed again and why?

At this point, she passed within a couple of feet of Maglor and his brothers Curufin and Caranthir and Maglor—preoccupied and distracted by his anxieties about those same negotiations but rousing himself to take a kindly interest—asked her: ‘That looks rather heavy, Narye. What have you got in there?’

She could simply have told him the truth and got away with it. It would not have occurred to him to question her further. But because she was unprepared for the question—because she had forgotten for a moment just how much she was trying to avoid drawing attention to that basket—she froze. Icy fear travelled down her spine and clouded her thinking.

A fraction of a second before her common sense kicked back in, she heard herself blurt out: ‘Roses!’—and then she froze again, this time in horror. _Idiot. Oh, idiot!_

Maglor, startled but still too distracted to be suspicious, asked: ‘Roses, in this season?’ At the same time, he reached out and, before she could draw away, he had opened the lid of the basket.

There was a moment of utter silence. Maglor had always been prone to moments of profound absentmindedness when the music of the Ainur sang too loudly to him, but he had never been a fool. Naurthoniel knew she ought to be studying the expression on his face to find out what fate might be in store for her—however her king chose to regard her transgression: at the least lying and theft, at the worst treachery and fraternization with the enemy—but terror seemed to have struck her blind; she could not see.

Then Maglor’s voice rang out about her, golden and vibrant: ‘Ah, roses! What colour! What scent!’

He had been a poet and a magnificent performer, of course, before he became a king saddled with an impossible legacy, and even now the power of his voice was such that Naurthoniel, completely befuddled, found herself staring into her basket as if the miraculous transformation might actually have taken place—and also considering, absurdly, what a waste that would be.

She looked up again, wide-eyed, to see Curufin furiously open his mouth just as Caranthir’s elbow crashed into Curufin’s ribs with an impact that made Naurthoniel wince. Curufin took a look at Maglor and thought better of what he had been about to say. Caranthir’s ruddy face was completely expressionless.

Naurthoniel thought that Caranthir said so little, except for his rare, violent outbursts, that she had quite forgotten just how much he knew about people. And because, poor man, he could not really stand any of them at all, she had entirely overlooked the possibility that he might actually be on her side in this.

‘Have a rose then’, she said in confusion, still looking at Caranthir, and pressed a freshly-baked bannock into Maglor’s hand.

And then she took to her heels and ran, because at their usual meeting-place on the outskirts of the camp Huntress was already waiting for her.

***

‘I turned out not to be all that good at adventures and exploration’, she said to Maedhros. ‘Maybe I should stay behind this time.’

She spoke with reluctance. The imagination of some of the Fingolfinians had seized on the rose incident and they had decided that she was an exception, the one good Feanorian who proved the rule. That was completely wrong, she felt, a highly embarrassing misunderstanding, but it did mean that she was unlikely to encounter obstacles or harassment if she stayed in Mithrim.

Maedhros sighed and rubbed his hand across his face. She wondered whether those unnatural scars that were refusing to fade perhaps still itched at times.

They had not talked much about past events. She knew when Maglor had told him about the rose incident because Maedhros had sent her a formal letter of condolence on the death of her aunt from his sickbed, penned by a secretary, together with a pot of roses in a small basket. She had supervised his meal trays, charting the progress of his recovery. Every time too much of the solid food came back uneaten, she had substituted thin gruel again.

‘There will have to be a certain amount of exploration’, said Maedhros. ‘But when we are done exploring, I am planning to build a castle out there, Narye, a large castle with thick walls. And it will not only be for warriors—although many of us will have to be warriors for we will be at war there as much as here. It will also be a refuge in times of danger for all those who live round about.

‘A large castle, Narye, a permanent garrison and perhaps refugees—that is a lot of people to be fed and kept warm and clothed! And I confess I was hoping you and Ceredir would help me with that.’

Naurthoniel looked at him and remembered him as he had been in Tirion: the eldest son of Feanor descending onto the benches in front of their inn with a flock of young people like brightly-coloured birds.

‘And now you must—all of you!—order one of Narye’s famous cinnamon buns’, he had said to them, lightly, playfully, but with astonishing authority. ‘I promise you they are bound to induce a helpless craving in you to have just one more, just another bite, ever after!’

She had sold out that afternoon and every afternoon he came.

They had had a running joke between them about his alleged vanity, going back to the moment she had found herself reassuring him:

‘No, no, don’t worry—I am not at all serious about you! I just admire your looks!’

They would have to find something else to joke about now.

‘Yes’, she said, ‘I’m coming. I’ll run your castle for you.’

***

It took her completely by surprise when Huntress decided she was coming, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Miracle of the Roses is a story told about St Elizabeth of Hungary (and other saints). The plot, however, needed some major adaptations to fit a Feanorian context!

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to SWG on April 17, 2013


End file.
